Verboice

What is Verboice?

Voice is the most universal and inclusive means of communication, and it’s an ideal way to expand the reach and impact of health and humanitarian technologies.

Verboice is a free and open-source tool that makes it easy for anyone to create and run applications that interact via voice, allowing your users to listen and record messages in their own language and dialect or answer questions with a phone keypad. Verboice applications can start small and scale up, making it possible to improve lives even in communities previously closed off by literacy and technological barriers.

Benefits

Overcome literacy barriers with verbal communication

Create voice-based programs without coding

Scales to suite your needs

Generate applications using any computer with Internet access

Reach out to any community, anywhere there’s access to basic phones

API based on standards

What can I use Verboice for?

Verboice is an ideal solution for reaching out to communities whatever their level of literacy or technological sophistication. Here are a few of the ways Verboice can help you inform, educate, and improve the lives of any audience with access to basic phone services:

Advocating for Healthier Pregnancies and Happier Babies

Healthy babies and mothers form the foundation of a thriving community. With Verboice, mother/child health advocates can extend their educational outreach campaigns to communities with previously minimal access to prenatal and maternal health education. From month-by-month updates on what to expect during pregnancy to checkup reminders and newborn care advice, Verboice interactive voice campaigns can make a positive difference that will be felt for generations to come.

Researching Human Rights Conditions

There’s no better authority on the state of human rights in a community than community members themselves. Verboice allows human rights investigators to survey anonymous callers and get an accurate picture of the ground-level conditions in a community. When abuses are noted, human rights organizations can use Verboice to point the way toward supportive/protective resources, supply legal information, and give the most oppressed a voice that carries beyond the confines of their communities.

Coordinating First Responders

Effectively coordinating first response efforts can mean the difference between a relatively minor misfortune and a disaster. Using Verboice, first responders quickly get a firsthand look at the conditions in even widely separated communities, without having to spend precious time travelling from place to place. Triage efforts are based on voice reports gathered directly from victims, helping disaster response teams to better deal with often rapidly changing circumstances and deliver the best care possible.

Organizing Campaign Activists

With Verboice, activists can organize their members from anywhere in the world, using only basic phone equipment. From information about how to participate to inspirational messages from community leaders, outgoing communications can be easily recorded and made instantly available to fellow activists. To keep everyone on track, activists can share ideas about priorities and new initiatives from any cellular or landline-based phone. Whatever the cause, Verboice makes change just a little easier to achieve.

How does Verboice work?

Setting up Verboice is as simple as building your application and associating it with a phone number. An application can call your users, receive calls and respond based on the user’s keyboard input. Applications can be built using Verboice’s built-in tools or by having developers write code for new or existing applications.

Verboice

Projects

Who Is Using It?

SAVING LIVES AT BIRTH
Baby Monitor will take clinical screening directly to women in the critical period before and after birth. This mobile phone application, to be developed with partners at the Pop Council, will use interactive voice response technology to detect complications and take action. Women will listen to screening questions in their local language and respond via pressing a key. Baby Monitor will assess responses and, if necessary, send information, make referrals, and dispatch community health workers.